Obama channels Strickland on 'economic patriotism'

9/27/12 3:56 PM EDT

The Obama campaign is leaning hard today into the theme of “economic patriotism”: Barack Obama calls in his 2-minute TV ad for a “new economic patriotism,” and the president used the term on the stump in Virginia.

It’s a phrase that captures the nationalistic, combative tone of the president’s reelection campaign, as well as the economic contrast the Obama team has tried to draw with Mitt Romney.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about “economic patriotism” in the 2012 campaign, or even in the month of September. Readers may recall that former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland used the phrase to great effect in his speech to the Democratic National Convention.

Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands, and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps,” Strickland said then.

Toward the end of his speech, Strickland said: “Barack Obama is an economic patriot. Mitt Romney is an outsourcing pioneer.”

Strickland’s 2010 campaign has been a model for Obama’s, in Ohio and nationally, in a number of ways, but in no more public way than the aggressive, populist tone on the economy both candidates have shared. Obama delivers the “patriotism” line differently from the former Ohio governor, but the underlying message is very much the same.